One of the major problems associated with minimally invasive surgery is percutaneously debulking or reducing a large tissue volume such as with a cyst, tumor, or an organ for removal through an access sheath. A number of power-driven, surgical cutting instruments are presently available in which a side port or a partial opening at the distal end of a cutting tube are rotated to shear and aspirate bone and cartilage through a lumen of the instrument. These side ports or partially open-ended cutting instruments are inefficient in debulking large volumes of soft- tissue due to their limited access cutting surfaces, which require an angled or a side approach for cutting. Furthermore, these side port or partially open-ended instruments cannot core soft tissue. This significantly increases the time necessary to debulk and remove tissue through an access sheath. This is particularly applicable in laparoscopic or pelviscopic procedures in which large fibroid cysts must be removed. These power-driven side port or partially open-ended instruments are best suited for cutting cartilage or bone material in arthroscopic procedures, but are very inefficient in debulking and removing large volumes of soft tissue.
Another side port cutting instrument is manually operated and uses a series of opposing jaws that are opened and closed to grasp and shear the tissue. Such a manually-operated device is extremely limited in debulking tissue because of the time required for grasping and cutting each piece of the large tissue volume.
Another problem associated with these side port or partially open-ended instruments are the complex angles that are required for the cutting edges. Not only do these complex cutting angle instruments have limited access, but also provide limited control or directionality with respect to slicing or cutting soft tissue.